His accomplishments are far beyond project manager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
But more seriously, this has to do with DeepMind falling way behind the frontier in intelligence and cost per task. There's basically no reason to use a Gemini model today.
"Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI."
-July 29, 2024
2 years these charlatans have had their "imminent collapse" predictions repeatedly wrong, meanwhile all valuations, AGI progress in unsolved problems, and frontier leadership have been repeatedly vindicated that we are beginning ASI / the singularity.
His predictions (while often wrong) are at least somewhat justified and backed up by genuine scoops and original research. Altman goes on podcasts and talks about building Dyson spheres for energy.
Open weights will drop costs, but distribution matters. OpenAI has that.
Costs will come down. Deep entrenchment will not.
Each generation of model is more expensive to train and run than the last.
More efficient hardware? That means throwing out billions of dollars worth of existing hardware and buying billions more in hardware. The cheapest hardware is the stuff they already have because spending $70B in hardware to halve a $2-4B electricity bill just doesn’t make financial sense (and that’s if doubling hardware efficiency can happen before they go under).
If they cut costs by using smaller models, they are then racing to the bottom vs China which seems hard to do (especially with China’s cheap solar energy).
To say that’s an outrageous amount isn’t overstating in the slightest.
Given they are already being forced to drop inference prices in an attempt to compete with Chinese providers, I don’t know if billionaire investors will be willing to hand out that much money this time around if they can’t generate enough value to break even despite the hype.